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Jewelers’ Exhibition Puts Captures London’s Edge

Husam el Odeh, a young jeweler featured in the “Made in London” show, at his Hoxton studio. Credit
Museum of London

LONDON — Installations by seven contemporary London jewelers, now on show at the Museum of London, offer a unique demonstration of how the vibes of the British capital permeate and influence the work of artists who live there.

Directed by the museum’s senior fashion curator, Beatrice Behlen, it is co-curated by Agata Belcen, fashion editor at AnOther magazine.

Contemporary art goes way out beyond the evocation of aesthetic pleasure, and London, as a city, does the same. Among the jewelry pieces on show are blinding knuckle-dusters and bits of reworked scrap that do not necessarily dazzle, but do reflect the darker, sometimes intimidating side of the city.

“Agata and I had very similar ideas on the kind of pieces we wanted for the exhibition,” Ms. Behlen said. “We were not looking for pretty jewelry but jewelry that represented London. So, a bit dark, a bit edgy — I don’t really like that word but I can’t think of another that shows exactly what I mean.”

“London can be a hard place; you have to be quite tough,” she continued. “The pieces can be quite spiky and menacing.”

All the jewelers work in east London, an area that has become a pool of creativity over the past decade.

“We wanted to focus on people who were in the earlier part of their career,” Ms. Behlen said. “Once we had decided on a few individuals it become easier to pick the rest, as connecting ideas and themes began to emerge.”

Across the London skyline, modern structures like The Shard are mixed with architectural relics like St. Pauls Cathedral.

The German born jeweler Husam el Odeh has steered away from traditional designs with his Three-way Gold Ring and his Cutlery Crown, made of entwined forks and spoons, which stand a few feet away from the amulets of Duffy, a jeweler who makes talismanic pieces of metal and stones.

Brash graffiti covering once-abandoned warehouses in the Hackney Wick district are not so much signs of vandalism as they are subversive adornments channeling a new creative life that has invaded the buildings, in art shows, music nights, galleries and studios. In a similar vein, a “bird droppings” brooch by the London-born Frances Wadsworth-Jones subverts ideas of defilement. “Often my pieces are about double takes,” she said.

“Something looks normal at first but then you come closer and it’s able to have a double life because it is so small,” Ms. Wadsworth-Jones said. “I want to make objects that people think about, because I’ve surprised them.”

Each jeweler tends to work alone and, according to Ms. Behlen, none of them saw the work of the others until the exhibition brought them together.

“When the jewelers showed their pieces to each other it was interesting to see how many of the themes in the jewelry overlapped,” she said. “I’m really amazed in some ways how well everything fitted together.”

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Perhaps surprisingly, one of those recurring themes was nature, not something immediately associated with urban spaces.

“Nature isn’t the initial thing you think of when you hear ‘London’,” Ms. Behlen said. “But I think the work in this exhibition also represents new life being brought into the city, which is shown through nature.”

The work of Noemi Klein draws inspiration from the imagery of life, death, nature and structure. “I wasn’t aware of what anyone else was doing,” Ms. Klein said. “I have thought that in recent jewelry work in general there has been a bit of overlap. I wanted to go back to what inspires the pieces as opposed to the pieces themselves. I wanted to go back to their original form.”

“For example, there is this ring in one of my pieces that is like a birds foot,” she added. “So I obtained a taxidermy bird to show the original foot next to the one I created.”

Underwater creatures inspire other pieces by Ms. Klein: crustacean legs, for example, or a fish’s spine.

“Nature has both chaos and order,” she said. “For the exhibition I was free from the practical constraints of making wearable objects and it was like making mini sculptures. It was then nice to give objects an actual home.

“My approach involves a lot of coincidence, collecting bits of art and imagery. It is both a haphazard and technical process — there is a lot of casting and carving, a bit like a collage.”

Like nature, the process of making jewelry is constantly evolving and requires the metamorphosis of materials, shapes and structures. The exhibition itself is as much about the journey of creation as it is about the final jewelry products.

“It’s quite different from other exhibitions, and looks like more of a work space than a museum,” Ms. Behlen said.

Husam el Odeh has recreated part of his London studio as a setting for his pieces to show the creative process and physical craft of his work. “I find it hard to imagine working anywhere else,” Mr. Odeh said. “I try out that thought every now and then to see if I’m ready — but I don’t think I am.”

“I started as a jeweler in London, and a lot of the chaos and juxtaposition — and how London is — has flowed into my work,” he said. “It’s very substantially rooted in London. I refer to it a lot, directly and indirectly.”

Duffy is another who focuses on the productive process. “I became a jeweler to be a jeweler, not a jewelry designer,” he said. “To be the jeweler is to be the person that physically makes something.”

“The different areas in jewelry are so skill-specific it would be impossible for me to be able to do everything, considering people can spend five years training to be a polisher,” he added. “Stone setting’s a five-year apprenticeship too. It goes on — enamelers, engravers, mounters, chasers. But I try to do as much as I can.”